Savannah filmmaker pursues local projects, starts business

"I'm not good with words," said the 23-year-old Savannah filmmaker. "If you can show someone a visual of what it is, it's a lot easier to communicate what your idea is."

He sees the world through his eyes and a camera lens. His occasional collaborator Landon Lott, who graduated with Arnold in May from the Savannah College of Art and Design, said his friend loves to capture life on film.

"Every time I see him, there's a camera in his hands," Lott said. "That's the best thing you can do: always tell a story, always get a shot."

Born in Boston and raised in the Northeast, Arnold can point to seventh grade, when his parents gave him a video camera for Christmas, as perhaps the start of his career path.

He would make videos of he and his friends rollerblading, edit them and put them to music.

"It was less about the content than the process," Arnold said.

He fell in love with the magic of movies. "Jaws" and "Top Gun" were among those that made a lasting impression.

Two teachers at his high school in Westport, Conn., fostered his interest in visual arts and provided the connection to SCAD.

Arnold attended SCAD from 2005 to 2010, majoring in film with a minor in photography, which appealed to him because of the required attention to detail.

"Portraiture really got me telling the story within one frame," Arnold said. "Once you can do that, if you can apply that to a movie and make every shot really count, it just makes it that much better."

He worked on many student projects, including one that was shown at the annual Gray's Reef Ocean Film Festival in Savannah. But it was after graduating that he and Lott would make a great impression at the festival in September.

The Gulf oil spill was a lead headline in daily papers and a subject of conversation when the pair gathered with their families for SCAD's graduation ceremony and celebration in May. When Arnold's father, Tim Sr., spoke about the impact of iconic images from the Vietnam War, he triggered an idea in the young filmmakers.

They headed to Louisiana, aiming to capture - in about six days on a budget of about $700 -what people might be missing from the nightly newscasts. They stayed with Lott's family, who live in Plaquemines Parish near New Orleans, and used local contacts to talk to people about the disaster and the area's murky future.

The title of their six-minute film, "Skimming the Surface," has a double-meaning, referring to both the process of removing the spilled oil and the knowledge that the short film has a specific focus on a greater, more complicated issue.

Their film won the festival's Dr. Robert O. Levitt Award for Emerging Filmmakers. They would like to use the prize money of $2,000 toward revisiting the issue in a future film project.

Arnold also has started his own business with former SCAD students Jon Spicola, 26, and Skip Terpstra, 27, called the Savannah Film Co.

"We have a big name. We're trying to live up to it," Spicola said.

Arnold already was directing music videos, and the group has produced projects for Savannah Country Day School, Old Savannah Tours, The South magazine and other businesses.

"We're trying to do the commercial stuff as well as the creative stuff for the love of it," Arnold said. "We try to keep our enthusiasm throughout all the productions. We try to put some jazz into something that would ordinarily be kind of dull."